Joshua Stein

The latest salvo in the McNally Gansevoort wars have a distinctly Imperious look. A tipster sends in this photograph from the door of McNally's Meatpacking mecca Pastis. Yes, some irony: McNally is the Englishman who could be said to have colonized the Meatpacking district from its backwoods butcher days to the assfest it is today. But that doesn't stop him from step up his campaign against the Hotel Gansevoort and its sail-sized billboard. It also doesn't make him wrong.

Eight-story high, freeway-style biillboards, like the one the Hotel Gansevoort has erected on Hudson Street, do not belong in our neighborhood. In fact, billboards of this size and nature destroy the very qualities that make the West Village and the Meat Packing District so unique and desirable. The Hotel Gansevoort greatly benefits from the character and appeal of our neighborhood. Now it is resolutely destroying it.